Incorporating Affect in an Engineering Student's Epistemological Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores how incorporating affect influences an engineering student's epistemological beliefs and their dynamic shifts within classroom contexts, aiming to unify affect and epistemology research.

Contribution

It presents a case study that begins to connect affect with epistemological dynamics in engineering education, addressing a gap in understanding their interaction.

Findings

Affect impacts students' epistemological stances.

Students shift between epistemological positions within a classroom.

The study initiates a long-term effort to unify affect and epistemology research.

Abstract

Research has linked a student's affect to her epistemology (Boaler & Greeno, 2000), but those constructs often apply broadly to a discipline and/or classroom culture. Independently, an emerging line of research shows that a student in a given classroom and discipline can shift between multiple locally coherent epistemological stances (Hammer, Elby, Scherr, & Redish, 2005). Our case study of Judy, an undergraduate engineering major, begins our long-term effort at uniting these two bodies of literature.